Writing a Genuine Significance Section
The significance section answers the audience's unspoken question: so what? You'll learn how to write significance that feels earned and specific rather than generic and tacked on.
What Significance Is (and Isn't)
Significance explains concretely why the audience, personally or as members of a broader community, should care about what they just learned — it is not a vague closing statement like 'this topic is important for everyone.' Strong significance ties back to specific facts from the speech rather than introducing brand-new, unsupported claims.
Layers of Significance
Effective significance often works in layers: personal relevance (how this affects the individual listener), community or societal relevance (how this affects a broader group), and sometimes a forward-looking layer (what happens if this trend continues or if awareness spreads). Not every speech needs all three layers, but even one specific layer beats a vague generalization.
The Personalization Test
A useful check for significance is asking whether it could be delivered word-for-word in front of a completely different audience (a different age group, a different community) and still feel equally true and specific — if the significance is so generic it works for any audience, it's likely not specific enough for this one.
A speaker's early significance draft for her antibiotic resistance speech reads: 'This is important because antibiotics matter to everyone.'
Revised significance: 'The next time you get a simple infection, the antibiotic that once cured your grandparents in days might not work on you at all — and if resistant bacteria keep spreading at current rates, routine surgeries could become as dangerous as they were a century ago.' This version layers personal relevance (your own future infections) with a forward-looking societal stake (the future of routine medicine), both tied to facts already established in the speech.
1. What distinguishes strong significance from a vague closing statement?
2. True or False?
"A speech's significance section should generally introduce major new claims not otherwise supported in the speech."
3. What does the 'personalization test' for significance check for?
Answer all 3 to check.
Write significance in specific, layered terms — personal, community, and forward-looking — grounded in facts already established in the speech.